The exhibition brought together, for the first time, four seminal artists, each of whom disappeared from the art world in different ways and for different reasons.

The exhibition gives a comprehensive overview of the life and work of the little known but influential pre-Dadaist poet, critic and rabble-rouser, Arthur Cravan, as well as post-war American based artists Bas Jan Ader, Chris Burden and Lee Lozano. As the title “Gestures of Disappearance” suggests, the exhibition focuses on the ostentatious, performative and, for some, inescapable aspects of artistic withdrawal.

When each of the artist’s scepticism about the social and political capacities of art reached its climax, their doubts in their own role as an artist became visible in both artworks and symbolic gestures. These gestures negotiated the individual possibilities within a societal framework that all four criticised, sometimes drastically, with sharp insight and little will to compromise.

Lozano and Cravan left the art world for good. Burden did not. Ader died during his last project, an attempt to cross the Atlantic from Cape Cod in his one-man yacht. The melancholic and existentialistic tone of the exhibition makes tangible the artists’ struggles with their identities and future perspectives. It points to an artistic model or myth of the artist rooted in romanticism, a position which had become ever more fragile, irrelevant and inadequate.

“Gestures of Disappearance” is curated by Alexander Koch.

In NO.5 Bergen Kunsthall revisits selected artworks and exhibitions, previously presented elsewhere in the world. Initiated in response to the increasing acceleration of both the production and reception of art, NO.5 provides an opportunity to slow down, focus on, and look again at particular works, exhibitions or fragments of exhibitions. Bergen Kunsthall will commission a new critical text to accompany each of these re-presentations.

Ane Hjort Guttu Festival Exhibition 2015

May 28 - Aug 16, 2015

Curated by Steinar Sekkingstad and Martin Clark. Ane Hjort Guttu’s new film will be presented at South London Gallery in late 2015.

Ane Hjort Guttu is the 2015 Festival Artist. This exhibition will present a new body of work, commissioned by Bergen Kunsthall, which investigates issues of power, freedom, the role and responsibility of the artist, and the possibilities and limitations of so called ‘political art’.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is a major new film, shot on location in Bergen, about a young art student who assumes the role of a beggar on the streets of the city. The work takes up a challenging position amidst the current debate on the prohibition of begging in Norway and the authorities’ treatment of the Romanian Roma. At the same time it gathers together a number of themes to which Guttu constantly returns in her works: the use of and access to public space; the scope of action for art and artists in the face of a politically sensitive situation; how we can or should position ourselves in relation to poverty and inequality; or whether effective political action is best achieved outside of the frame of art?

These themes are further explored through a number of other works in the exhibition which investigate the way in which the visual space of the city is changing. The privatization and commercialization of public space is another current issue in Bergen, where the municipality has recently signed a contract with an international agency for a significant increase in urban advertising. Set against the debate around begging, it highlights a contradictory and complex debate around the use of and rights to public space, and the way these different activities and demands also infringe on our personal space and psyche.

For the new film Guttu continues her collaboration with the cinematographer Cecilie Semec and actor Damla Kilickiran, who also worked with Guttu on her recent piece This Place is Every Place (2014), commissioned by Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm. With the Arab Spring as a backdrop, This Place is Every Place links global protest movements with the local reality of the Swedish suburbs. Just as This Place is Every Place might be perceived as a portrait of Tensta, Guttu’s new film is a portrait of Bergen. Both works meditate on the beauty and poetry of the city while at the same time exposing social inequality and problematic power relations. The quiet, reflective idiom of the film underscores Guttu’s role as both observer and actor, occupying a conscious position in the borderland between documentary and fiction. This position is reflected in Guttu’s practice in general, where the artistic work itself — the role of the artist and the potential of art — constantly finds itself in an ambivalent position: as an object of investigation and transcendental reverie, but at the same time rooted in an unshakable faith in art as a critical and political tool.

Ane Hjort Guttu (b. 1971) lives and works in Oslo.

Curated by Steinar Sekkingstad and Martin Clark. Ane Hjort Guttu’s new film will be presented at South London Gallery in late 2015.